That is the predicament now confronting the mortgage industry, where it has become clear that many billions of dollars in home loans were sold, guaranteed and rated as safe without anyone bothering to examine whether the loans were made with due regard for the rules.
But many of the insurers have been laid low by their exposure to mortgage-backed securities, leaving just two firms to sell guarantees at less attractive rates.That things are not even worse is the result of a federal initiative that could permanently change the municipal market.
So you can just imagine how they are salivating over the prospect of leverage over startups via the ability to pit one Internet business against the other by selling "guaranteed good transmission quality".
And now some in Congress want to abolish them altogether, and replace them with what is basically a privately-funded secondary market mechanism for packaging and selling guaranteed mortgages with sky-high capital requirements that will raise interest rates, putting even more consumers out of the housing market.
One percent of the retail sales of all products labeled "whole trade guarantee" sold at the Whole Foods stores go directly to the foundation, meaning the money then goes directly towards financing micro loans for women.
Yet they are never sold with guarantees; indeed, most come with dire warnings.
Although only a small percentage of works are sold with guarantees, they are often the most expensive.
Even the railways, which are down for privatisation, may well be sold with guarantees protecting jobs and services.On the wrong trackMaking Greece's economy work better would mean far greater changes to a dysfunctional state.
Though the four are not in all the same businesses, they were caught in one of the same traps: They sold mortgage guarantees — in some cases to each other.
Though bidders never know who in a salesroom might be a guarantor or what price has been guaranteed, the auctioneers, as required by law, do disclose at the start of a sale that some works will be sold with guarantees and denote them with small symbols in the catalog.
